Hearing Chen Ge's question, the three people inside the iron cage reacted differently.
The oil-stained old man said nothing, simply licking his fingers as though savoring whatever he had just eaten.
The woman's eyes went wide and she thrashed desperately inside the cage, like a large fish that had been thrown onto dry land.
The middle-aged man's reaction was the most unusual of the three — he was the only one who had kept his eyes locked on Chen Ge the entire time, unblinking.
"Why are these three locked up inside a psychiatric hospital?" Chen Ge walked over to the old man's cage first. Inside the steel-bar enclosure sat two plastic bowls.
The old man noticed someone approaching but showed no fear. He sat in the center of the cage and, oblivious to everything around him, continued sucking the residual grease from his fingers.
"So he's the one who was transferred from Ward One." Chen Ge studied him for a long time but couldn't find anything obviously wrong. "His hair is uneven — someone shaved it with a blade. This must have grown back since then."
Seeing the old man's hair, Chen Ge thought of the strands he had found on the back of the nurse station cabinet. Some of them were a mix of black and white — they must have belonged to the old man sitting in front of him.
"His head was shaved, and the hair has already grown back this much. That means he's been imprisoned here for quite a while." At the time, Chen Ge had estimated four different people based on the varying hair lengths, but only three sat before him now.
"There's one more I haven't found."
Chen Ge's gaze swept past the woman and finally settled on the middle-aged man. His hair was long and wild, draped messily over his head. "This one's hair doesn't seem to have been shaved?"
Chen Ge grew more cautious. Shaving heads appeared to be the culprit's sick hobby — a way of toying with prey. But why would the killer spare the middle-aged man?
Did the middle-aged man know the killer? Or was he the killer himself?
The thought startled Chen Ge. Back at the junction between Ward One and Ward Two, he had glimpsed a face he didn't recognize — an asymmetrical, somewhat deformed face. That face could move freely through the wards and had been watching and following him. It should have been the mastermind behind everything. But now there was this middle-aged man too. If that was the case, the killers imprisoning these victims might number more than one.
Chen Ge gripped his hammer tighter. His mind even conjured a worse scenario.
What if, inside this ward, everyone besides himself was a killer?
Of course, the odds of that were slim.
He thought for a moment, then finally stopped in front of the woman.
Neither of the men had any intention of answering his questions, so he could only try removing the pillowcase from the woman's mouth to see whether he could learn anything from her.
"Don't be afraid. I'm here to save you." Chen Ge rattled the lock on the cage. Without a key, relying solely on the hammer — who knew how long it would take before he could free the three of them.
The woman seemed to have an innate terror of living people. The moment Chen Ge drew near, she began to panic, whimpering through the pillowcase, shaking her head and flailing her hands in agitation.
"Stay calm. I'm not going to hurt you." Chen Ge circled to the front of the woman and was about to pull the pillowcase from her mouth when the middle-aged man, who had been silent until now, suddenly spoke up.
"I'd advise you not to let her talk. She's very loud."